April 23, 2009 - Doughnut Holes

In Alison’s office they have doughnuts on payday, but one of her co-workers is vegan, and doesn’t have the chance to partake of this tradition. In light of this, she requested that we try to make vegan doughnut holes that she could bring in on the next payday, which happened to be Friday, April 24. It sounded like a delicious challenge.

This week we had a friend of ours, Karen, visiting, and invited her to join us. She showed up as we were frying our first batch, and helped shape the doughnut holes for our second batch.

Alison had spied a recipe online for making doughnut holes, using biscuit dough. Unfortunately when she went to print it, she found that the recipe had been pulled. Some searching revealed another doughnut hole recipe, from which we tried to recreate the recipe she had found, using the new one to get information on how to do the actual frying.

Research showed that the Heart Smart Bisquick is vegan, and using soymilk, we make the biscuit dough using the recipe on the box. The dough ended up quite sticky, and a little hard to work with, and we believe that using almond milk might fix this problem, based on Alison’s previous experience. We rolled the dough into balls, the batch making 11 doughnut holes. Because of the extra Bisquick needed to get the sticky dough off our fingers and the cutting board, the balls were less than smooth, creating fault-lines in them.

We had an 8-quart pot to which I had added all of my vegetable oil, then all of my canola oil, in an attempt to have enough oil to cover the doughnut holes. Lacking a thermometer to test that the oil was to the recommended 350 degrees, we used little bits of dough to test the oil. When it got to the point that the test dough rose immediately to the top of the oil, bubbling, and starting to brown almost instantly upon dropping it into the oil, we knew it was hot enough. We then added our doughnut holes to the oil. They weren’t quite submerged, and we kept rolling them to make sure they cooked all the way through, and evenly on all the sides. We watched as they expanded as they fried, and we realized that our 11 doughnut-hole sized treats were expanding into monster treats.

Once they were done frying, we fished them out of the oil, turning the heat down, but not off, and put them on a paper towel briefly. Then the still-hot monster doughnut holes were put into a paper bag which had a confectioners sugar / cinnamon power mix. Shaking the doughnut holes in the bag, they came out nicely coated, but we added a second paper bag to the outside, after the first go-round, as there was a little bit of mess from the attempt.

For our second batch, we made the same biscuit dough, but made the raw doughnut holes much smaller, yielding about 4 times as many as the first batch. Aside for some small burns from splashing oil (I’m very sorry, Lila), these worked much better.

The larger doughnut holes were a little damp in the middle, while the smaller ones cooked faster and more thoroughly. We found that the more oil was on the doughnut holes when we put them in the bag of sugar and cinnamon, the more coating they picked up, but the less like traditional doughnut holes they looked. The oil had the effect of making a paste-like coating, which tended to break off the treats when handled. With less oil on the doughnut holes, the sugar was more of a light dusting, which had a more firm hold on the treats.



This recipe will take some practice to get a consistent treat, but the only adjustment we might make to the recipe itself is trying almond milk or rice milk to see if either yields a less sticky / easier to work with dough.

April 16, 2009- Chocolate Cake with Chocolate-Raspberry Ganache

Every bakery worth its salt needs a good chocolate cake recipe. While this was the first chocolate cake recipe we found and have tried, we may have the winner we were looking for.

Baking this Thursday was at Lila’s apartment, and one of our girl friends, Allyson, who had a week off from her job for spring break, joined us. She was mostly there to hang out, but we put her to work in the kitchen, as well.

We worked with the in-the-pan Mountain-High Chocolate Cake recipe Lila found in the cookbook Student's Vegetarian Cookbook, Revised. Since the recipe is designed to yield a single layer cake, and we wanted to have a two-tiered cake, we simply doubled the recipe, making one batch in each of our borrowed 8-inch pans (thanks Allyson for bringing these).

When we settled in to start, we realized that we were missing an ingredient, and while Lila’s boyfriend went to pick up said ingredient, she and I set to making the chocolate ganache that we were going to use in lieu of icing. The ganache was simple (found in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World), with few ingredients, just heating them on the stove until the semi-sweet chocolate chunks melted. We were happily surprised to find out that Baker’s Semi-sweet baking chocolate is vegan, and we used an entire box, as we made our double batch of chocolate ganache. When it was done, we put a lit on it, and moved it to a different burner, figuring we didn’t want to refrigerate it, less it harden to a point where it wasn’t usable.

Once the last ingredients arrived, we set to making the two single-pan cakes. Alison on one bowl, and Lila on the other, we had Allyson narrate the recipe while I helped prepare the ingredients to go into each pan. The addition of vinegar activated (caused a reaction with) the baking soda, and since we wanted the cakes to be as identical as possible, we measured out the vinegar for one pan into a small dish, and added it to one pan as we used the measuring spoon to add to the second pan at the same time. Alison and Lila mixed these in, and we opened the oven for the pans to be added at the same time.

We used damp pan liners to prevent the edges from cooking much faster than the middle, but both cakes did rise / were puffier in the middle, as cakes tend to be, but it wasn’t too bad. The addition of these pan liners did add about 5 minutes to the cooking time, however.

We placed the cakes, in the pans, on the cooling racks, but after a while our impatience got to us, and we deftly (after Alison came up with a method to do so) flipped the cakes out onto the cooling racks directly. This did result in what looked like grill lines on the tops of the cakes. We did notice, as the cakes cooled upside down that some of the flour and dry ingredients were stuck around what were the edges of the pan, and didn’t mix in properly. If we continue to use this recipe, or if anyone else uses it, I recommend making doubly sure that the edges of the pan are paid special attention to when mixing the ingredients. It was like the little pockets of dry hid under the other ingredients.

We thought about putting raspberry preserves between the layers of cake, and using the ganache to ice the outside, but as Lila heated the perseveres, we decided to add it directly to the ganache. This made a delicious mix, but made the ganache a little more liquidy. In the future, we’ll add the preserves when we are making the ganache, and let the mix cool to room temperature before using.

Wanting a smooth edge to ice, and not having a device to trim the top off the cakes, we placed them top-sides together, with ganache between, and then icing the outside. Because of the slight puffiness, this meant there was a small gap around the edge of the cake, which we tried to fill with extra ganache, but when all was said and done, you could still see the gap.

While the cake was not perfect in appearance (in fact, a fault line appeared in the top), it was wonderful tasting. The addition of the raspberry to the ganache made it extra extravagant. We’ll need to work on the art of building a pretty cake, but I think we have a great tasting vegan chocolate cake recipe to add to our menu, and perhaps with some tweeks, a base for a brownie recipe, as well.